Friday, January 12th, 2018
Stephan: Recently the Washington Post committed the time and effort necessary to really assess how great a liar Donald Trump is. They found nearly 2,000 lies made by Trump as President of the United States. Actually the number is slightly higher since Trump is averaging 5.6 lies per day, and this report came out on the 10th. It was a horrifying report. But the reality is even worse, as this report lays out. Today amongst registered and likely voters Trump, as vile a man as any who has held his office, has a 40.9% approval rating. Think about that.
The offices of the Washington Post
Credit: AP/Charles Dharapak
The Washington Post put out an in-depth analysis of President Trump’s 1,950 lies and misleading claims over his first year in office. It’s an impressive feat since the Post had to fact-check everything and allow Trump’s third-grade-level speeches to enter its fact-checkers’ earholes, a punishment I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies.
The writers at the Washington Post are correct that lies spray out of Trump’s face with the force of an untethered fire hose. They’re also correct that almost every statement by Trump is either false or misleading. However, the irony is that almost every statement the Washington Post prints in correcting Trump’s lies is in itself a lie or misleading statement. So, to be clear, I’m not saying Trump is not lying. I’m saying that the way in which our mainstream media correct him is also meant to deceive us.
The Washington Post starts with December and counts backward through the year. Here are my corrections to its corrections to Trump’s lies. (This is only a few weeks’ […]
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Thursday, January 11th, 2018
David Wallace-Wells, Staff Writer - New York Magazine
Stephan: This is the best article I have seen in a great while that describes what is coming, Perhaps it will also explain what readers keep asking me: "Why are you so focused on climate change?" This will explain why.
Do yourself a favor and read this all the way through.
I. ‘Doomsday’
Peering beyond scientific reticence.
It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 […]
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Thursday, January 11th, 2018
Stephan: Another ringing alarm bell. The outrageously high mortality rate of American children yesterday, the lifespan of older Americans sorted by their incomes today. And yet as of 10 minutes ago, on fivethrityeight, Trump's approval rating has actually gone up. For registered and likely voters it is now 40.9%.
I am rapidly getting to the point where I have no choice but to conclude that Americans are getting either what they voted for, or what they defaulted to because they didn't vote.
Changes in race- and ethnicity-adjusted life expectancy by income group, 2001 to 2014. Credit: JAMA
Living in the US increasingly looks like a health risk. Average life expectancy here dropped for the second year in a row, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The grim trend stems from a toxic mixture of more drug- and alcohol-related deaths and more heart disease and obesity in many parts of the country. And it puts Americans at a higher risk of early death compared to their counterparts in other wealthy countries. (emphasis added)
But what’s often lost in the conversation about the uptick in mortality here is that this trend isn’t affecting all Americans. In fact, there’s one group in the US that’s actually doing better than ever: the rich. While poor and middle-class Americans are dying earlier these days, the wealthiest among us are enjoying unprecedented longevity.
So when we talk about life expectancy slipping, what we should also talk about is the growing problem of health inequality in America. And it’s […]
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Thursday, January 11th, 2018
Nicholas Kristof, Ope-ed Columnist - The New York Times
Stephan: Read this and harken to its words, Americans. Your democracy is disappearing like a morning fog.
Credit: Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
Two political scientists specializing in how democracies decay and die have compiled four warning signs to determine if a political leader is a dangerous authoritarian:
1. The leader shows only a weak commitment to democratic rules. 2. He or she denies the legitimacy of opponents. 3. He or she tolerates violence. 4. He or she shows some willingness to curb civil liberties or the media.
“A politician who meets even one of these criteria is cause for concern,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, both professors at Harvard, write in their important new book, “How Democracies Die,” which will be released next week.
“With the exception of Richard Nixon, no major-party presidential candidate met even one of these four criteria over the last century,” they say, which sounds reassuring. Unfortunately, they have one update: “Donald Trump met them all.”
We tend to assume that the threat to democracies […]
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Thursday, January 11th, 2018
Paul Blumenthal, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: The Republican Party as this report illustrates is now explicitly a party of White supremacists, grifters, crooks, know-nothings, and corruption.
Donald “Don” Blankenship, former chief executive officer of Massey Energy Co., exits the Robert C. Byrd U.S. Courthouse in Charleston, West Virginia, U.S., on Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2015. The jury ended an eighth day of deliberations without a verdict after a juror became ill. Prosecutors allege that he coal executive plotted to ignore safety rules before a 2010 mine explosion that killed 29.
Credit: Emily Harger/Bloomberg
WASHINGTON ― When Joe Arpaio, the former Maricopa County sheriff, announced his Senate candidacy on Tuesday, he became the fourth viable Republican 2018 congressional candidate who’s been convicted of a crime. And like two of the other GOP cons running for office, he has cited his criminal record as a partial justification for his candidacy.
